Google promises 0.001 of revenue to free the slaves Google is on course to smash the £30bn annual revenue barrier by the end of this year, so - in time-honoured fashion with it be Christmas 'n' all - the company has plonked just over 0.1 per cent of this cash on the philanthropic pile. The world's largest ad broker isn't just fretting about educating girls, empowering people …
$40m may sound a lot but remember google also want to give $33m to NASA to give Hangar One a makeover so that they have somewhere nice to stash their fleet of eight private jets!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/12/google_nasa_hangar_one/
No doubt the donation to the charitable fund will be made in whatever country has the highest tax, any chance it will be made from one of the international tax havens that google operate from.
Just because I'm a cynical old git doesn’t mean that there isn’t some financial advantage to google in doing this.
The apple manufacturers (Hon Hai /= Foxconn )were spending over $3 Billion on a robot making factory, factory. Having dropped the idea of buying them in. 1 million by 2013, up from tens of thousands right now.
With the autonomy working it's way into all professions, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0Lj_5MBu8w , I can't see many people escpaing it.
Let's choose the year, say, AD 1720. We have slavery rife in the New World, in Europe (esp eastern Europe), Russia, China, the Muslim world, and Africa. Every serf and peasant bound to the land and without rights to dispose of his or her property, wealth or children, forbidden to travel, and under the authority of some master, was a slave. Serfs in Russia could be bought and sold as easily as an African deportee to the Americas.
There are many more people in the world today, but the percentage in bondage is probably smaller. Not that this justifies a single person suffering the realities of slavery right now. But the rich locals in Dubai want their house servants and we want cheap designer clothes and many people are in poverty and powerless, so as night follows day...
'Slavery' in this context is quite rigidly defined, and it specifically excludes 'serfs' (whose labour is forced by economic necessity, not by whips and chains).
In terms of absolute numbers (not proportions): the upper-bound limit for estimates of the number of true slaves today is around 27 million. Historically, the peak population was probably reached in the early 19th century, when there were an estimated 8-9 million in India, 3.5 million in the USA, a million or so in the Arab world, plus substantial numbers in China, Korea and the Ottoman Empire. I haven't seen any serious attempts to estimate worldwide total numbers at that time, but it's entirely possible the number would have been lower than 27 million.
Don't forget that the British are bought up on a diet of everything should be handled by the state (NHS, benefits, overseas aid...).
So when a wealthy company (who, not being the state, are evil) gives money, it is greeted with cynical responses. It's OK for a footballer to earn millions, but god help a director or owner of a business.
The British are brought up on a diet of government fiscal policy being better than relying on charity, yes. Its super you feel that relying on the generosity of the private sector is fine, and governments should be squandering their money on... what, their militaries? But that's rather irrelevant here... I'm not quite sure where y'all are getting the impression that this is a negative article. It clearly states that the tiny percentage of Google's wealth adds up to a big sum of money, and its being used for a perfectly reasonable cause. Seems like a positive article to me, but then, not being a yank maybe there are overtones I've missed.
Speaking of slavery and forced labour, how's the US domestic manufacturing industry doing? Good on you all for keeping penal servitude alive and well, and keeping those prisons well stocked with ethnic types, like all those folk who used to work your plantations.
Well put.
Looking at the PISA results for 2000-2009 it isnt entirely clearcut. Towards the start of the 'naughties' British students decimated American ones. More recently the American students are ahead. Whats more interesting is how far from the top both countries are. Korea, Finland and more recently some parts of China are well ahead.
Pure capitalism (like pretty much any other ideology) is flawed. We try and make the best and get along. There isn't a perfect solution because we aren't perfect. Theres always going to be the greedy, the feckless and the workshy to spoil it one way or another. A socialist, quasi capitalist democracy isn't perfect but well implemented it isn't bad. Pure capitalism well implemented works, but again not perfectly as we are seeing right now. Poor education, wealthy inequality and protests, high unemployment.
It's a sad day when our kids can't be better educated than kids in countries with a per capita gdp 1/10th of ours.
anything less than 0.1% isn't worth mentioning.
And yes, private giving is vastly morally superior to government giving. Government giving is some taking your money with the threat of physical violence if you don't pay, to give it to someone who didn't earn it. Oh, yes, there are layers and layers of obfuscation about it, but when all is said and done, you either comply with the orders of the state or you get shot.
The idea that the wealthy must have earned their wealth or they wouldn't have it is naive (to say the least!) One of the greatest recent examples of charitable giving has been the bail out of banks whose high 'earners' have, for example, reduced the value of Lloyds Bank from 505p a share to 34p a share. People who are not just worthless but a positive liability. Are they in the gutter? I think not.
The same rule of law that enforces taxation is the one that protects the lives and property of the wealthy. In fact property is a purely legal concept; without the law nobody would OWN anything. And, without the threat of force, there is no law.
All research on the subject shows that the poor give proportionately more to charity than the wealthy. Perhaps they are morally superior?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45195014/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/t/number-americans-poverty-record-high/#.Tun4bFaqHNU
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/04/editorials/hungry_us_children.htm
http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/harvard-medical-study-links-lack-of-insurance-to-45000-us-deaths-a-year/
USA USA USA.....
But Google has to answer to millions of shareholders. 99.99% of shareholders do not want the corporations they own throwing their money around in a way that doesn't increase their revenues, their profits, or the price of their shares.
It's as simple as that.
My actual figures are around double your assumptions, so yes, I can do arithmetic and it is 10% of my income because it is money I am lucky I don't *need* for my normal lifestyle and so prefer to help certain charities instead.
It is good that Google do something, and as I said in absolute personal terms it is a lot, but I feel that generosity is a measure of how much you sacrifice for a 'good cause'.
Applying Google's contribution (same theory applied for for BillyG) it would be my handing out £20 a year. Yes, it is better than kicking a beggar...
Money from private persons for their own reasons are fine, but I have a huge problem with megacorps donating money to some charity I might not even support and then expecting a pat on the back from the media. I give my donations where I feel appropriate and as I see fit. That's between me and God, not me and everybody else in the world. Same thing should apply to corporate types.
... giving money away simply because you think it's the right thing to do, and *announcing* your charitable donations to *the media* because it gets you lots of *free publicity*.
One is a genuinely selfless act. The other is a cynical marketing ploy thinly disguised in a "Selfless Act of Generosity®" costume.
That giving money to charity can also help reduce your corporate tax burden may also have a strong bearing on the amount being donated. When a corporation (or a large trust fund, or any person or entity with a large sum of disposable cash—and a pretty big tax bill rumbling in their general direction) not only gives money away, but makes a big song and dance about it, you can bet your arse it's not being done for the sheer joy of giving some money to people who would like to build glorified water fountains in Africa that will never be maintained and will thus be of no use to anyone within a year or so of their construction.
[Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16835-wasted-wells-fail-to-solve-africas-water-problems.html ]
You can get a pretty big discount off your next tax bill if you can show you've been giving away cash to charities. When Google "donates" money like this, remember that YOU are ALSO effectively donating on their behalf—without any by-your-leave—because that loss of tax revenue from Google has to be made up by tax revenues from someone else. I.e. you.
That nobody knows if / what Apple or Jobs has donated money to is an interesting point: the *assumption* is that no money went to a worthwhile cause, but I'd consider "keeping lots of people in gainful employment in a period of recession" a pretty damned worthwhile "cause".
We've been giving money to the starving people of African nations since the '80s, and they're *still* starving. Instead of teaching them how to fish, we assuaged our collective Abrahamic guilt—despite many Western societies now being ostensibly secular, it's impossible to wipe out millennia of religious influence overnight—by just throwing fish at them instead. The latter option is merely a short-term solution and has precisely no long-term benefits. It does, however, have some long-term *drawbacks*:
Entire generations have grown up who view themselves as chronic victims, have become effectively dependent on charitable donations, have too little education and information infrastructure available to allow them to make informed decisions in elections, and who are misruled by corrupt politicians, charlatans and warlords, all squabbling over all that lovely free cash. (There are a very few exceptions, but not many.)
Charity is not "good" by definition. It just means "giving stuff away". Research your target charities carefully; you may be surprised at how much they charge for, say, "administration costs", and how little they've actually manage to achieve over the years.
Therefore, just because someone is doing something "for charity", it does not logically follow that what they're doing is inherently "good". They may *believe* it is good, but that doesn't make it so.
You must be new here.
The "Evil" of MS (or Google) does not come from how much they give (or do not give) to charity. No company is obliged to do that, and I am not even sure they should anyway. It comes from their behaviour as a business. That MS money to which you refer has been ripped off people by shady and downright illegal means :-
http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
There is no equivalent to this in Google activity.
I've just finished reading the most excellent "The Strong Brown God: The Story of the Niger River" by Sanche De Gramont. In it he comments on the abolitionist activities of Victorian Britain. Whatever the moral imperatives, there were extremely powerful economic incentives to keep the local population where they were, so that they could become active producers (of palm oil and similar, to be shipped off to European factories) and consumers (of trinkets etc.)
Anyway, there's an irrelevant factoid for you.
Just in case there's some sort of parallel I haven't spotted, I'd better post anonymously.
Wow, this is awfully snide, and with a misleading title too. Why present the headline figure as a decimal (0.001) and then the percentage in the first sentence? Who would use a decimal like that for any reason other than to belittle the number? You'd never see a headline like "ACME CORP PROMISES 0.99 OF REVENUE TO FREE THE SLAVES" - they'd use 99%.
0.1% of a decent salary (£27,000 * 0.001) is only £27 per annum. I know many who give that in time/money monthly.
Google have no duty to give anything, but 0.1% is not especially generous, relatively speaking, as they pay considerably less in business tax than your £27k earner does in income tax. Each co-founder is worth $16 billion, and could give away 99% of that and have $160 million on which to scrape by.
Perhaps if Google paid a fair level of corporation tax in the countries they operate they could leave international development and policing of international law to governments, rather than making headline grabbing goodwill gestures.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23971485-britain-loses-out-in-googles-tax-avoidance.do
Read 'the Skeptical Environmentalist' to grok how these stats can be used two diametrically opposite ways.
Eg. more children die of starvation in Africa than ever before - but the proportion is smaller than it's ever been. Both are because more *don't* die in childbirth, of other diseases, war, &c - so things are *better* than they've ever been. But Presentism (qv) and charity publicists must always find the doomiest story....
The author forgot to include this little factoid:
{quote}These grants, which total $40 million, are only part of our annual philanthropic efforts. Over the course of the year, Google provided more than $115 million in funding to various nonprofit organizations and academic institutions around the world; our in-kind support (programs like Google Grants and Google Apps for Education that offer free products and services to eligible organizations) came to more than $1 billion, and our annual company-wide GoogleServe event and related programs enabled individual Googlers to donate more than 40,000 hours of their own volunteer time.{/quote}
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/giving-back-in-2011.html
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
